Belle’s Hot Chicken: The evolution of modern fast casual dining

MORGAN McGlone is so excited by his fast-growing casual restaurant format, Belles Hot Chicken, even he is stunned by its rapid success.

While Australians traditionally associate southern fried chicken with the well-entrenched KFC, the locally developed market has been bubbling along quite nicely.

From a tiny place to 8 venues

Belles has grown from a tiny operation in Fitzroy, Melbourne, in 2014, to eight venues in Sydney and Melbourne with expansion plans for either Brisbane or his homeland, New Zealand.

After ditching fine dining in Sydney and following a stint as chef de cuisine for Sean Brock of the famous Husk in Charleston, Virginia, McGlone developed a love for deep-fried finger lickin’ chicken and saw an opportunity to introduce a format into Australia.

“I just wanted it to be a real cool place where people could come with their families, their workmates, chefs and just have a really great fried chicken,” he says.

But we'll stay comfortable

“I kind of want to have a comfortable amount of shops. My business partners (Melbourne-based owners of Mr Burger, Welcome to Thornbury and Super Taco) want to have a few shops and they are all good with that but we don't want to have 125 shops like Grill’d. We would move too far away from what we envisaged that Belles would be.”

The winning fried chicken formula is based on a secret hybrid recipe McGlone developed with Brock based on southern fried but using a special hydration method, not a dredge where floured chicken is dredged in buttermilk then dipped in a crumb.

“It’s a bit different from the buttermilk method but it is still southern fried all the way through,” McGlone says. “But where it turns into Nashville hot chicken is that spice level that is added.

“I’ve often thought about buttermilk method but with the amount of volume we do (1.5 tonnes of chicken at Belles Barangaroo alone), we just can’t f*** with the recipe.”

Other standards include the slaw, which is six parts white cabbage, one part red cabbage, one part red onion and a dressing to an exacting formula.

We are not a QSR

McGlone employs qualified former fine-dining chefs in the taxing kitchen process, both as a method of quality control and staff retention.

“But we are not a QSR. We are not a fast food restaurant. We are a casual restaurant. All the guys that cook at the stores, except one, are qualified chefs.

“We had Jamie Oliver in the other day and I said (to the two chefs), ‘I need you to do the fried oysters’, ‘I need you to do the waffles exactly how I want it’.

“I do put a lot of pressure on those guys, making sure that this store is the flagship, we generally put all the new staff through there. The reason why we do that is because these guys know exactly how I want it. I trained them!”

Four days on, three days off

Building commissary kitchens in both cities, applying fine-dining processes, setting up good systems, and eliminating “fryer fatigue” will be key to his success, he says. Staff spend no more than two hours in front of the 178C fryer, “because it is just so intense” says McGlone and generally work four days on, three days off.

“Those days when I used to work 70 hours a week, those days are gone man,” he says with McGlone applying the same work-life balance rule to himself.

“My job now as the brand ambassador and culinary director of the brand is to make sure that every single nuance that we got out of the one shop is done over six and soon-to-be eight new venues.”

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